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On a bright-blue morning in July, 2023, a team of researchers took off in a catamaran from the island of Dominica in search of sperm whales. Sperm whales communicate via bursts of clicks, called codas, and the researchers—part of a project called the Cetacean Translation Initiative, or CETI—are hoping one day to decipher what the codas mean. On this particular morning, they were looking to attach an electronic tag to a whale so they could record both its clicks and its movements.

After a couple of hours, they happened upon eleven sperm whales, bunched closely together at the surface. This behavior was odd enough that the researchers dropped their plan to tag a whale. They launched a pair of camera-equipped drones to hover above the group. After another hour or so, a great cloud of blood swirled through the water. Then a new gray head appeared. Thanks to a crazily unlikely accident, the researchers had witnessed a sperm-whale birth and had managed to videotape the entire event.

Thanks to another crazy accident, I was onboard the catamaran that day. Not only did I get to witness the birth but also I got to watch the normally sober-minded researchers react to it. The scene on the deck resembled something out of the Marx Brothers. Everyone raced to the front of the boat to get a better view. “Oh, my God,” one of the scientists said, clutching his head. “Oh, my God, oh, my God.”

“Holy fucking shit,” another exclaimed.

For the next two hours, the whales remained bunched together. They seemed to be nudging the baby around, but what, exactly, was going on was hard to say from the vantage of the catamaran.

The researchers spent almost two years analyzing the drone footage, applying machine learning in combination with good, old-fashioned field biology. Today, they released a pair of papers chronicling what happened that July morning, one in the journal Science, the other in Scientific Reports. Their findings suggest that the whales offered the calf’s mother a level of assistance that puts midwifery to shame.

“I think it’s very enlightening to see another species working with such coöperation and care for their group,” Project CETI’s founder, David Gruber, who teaches biology at the City University of New York, told me. “Meanwhile, we do horrible things to each other. So there’s something to learn from them.”

Sperm whales have the largest brains of any creature on Earth. (These can weigh up to twenty pounds.) They are also highly social animals. Females travel together in groups that may include anywhere from a few to a few dozen members, and they share child-rearing duties. Male calves remain with their group until they are about fifteen years old; after that, they lead solitary lives and approach female groups only to mate.

Though sperm whales are highly mobile—they can travel tens of thousands of miles in a single year—the ones that frequent the waters off Dominica return often enough that scientists have been able to determine which whales hang out together. (Individuals can be identified by the shapes of their flukes.)

From the drone footage, which captured the moment the baby whale’s fluke first emerged, the researchers were able to determine that a whale named Rounder was the mother. Rounder is a member of a social group called Unit A, which consists of two families that are not closely related. Rounder’s family includes her mother and her half sister. The other includes an older whale named Fruit Salad, along with Fruit Salad’s daughter and granddaughter.

When sperm-whale calves are born, weighing about a ton, they are pretty helpless. They can’t immediately swim—their flukes are bent from being cramped in the womb—and, to use the technical term, they are “negatively buoyant.” Left to their own devices, they will sink. What the footage showed is that, for the first three hours of the newborn’s life, the members of Unit A took turns keeping it afloat. At times, they nestled so close to the baby that they formed a sort of raft beneath it. At other points, they carried the calf draped over their enormous heads.

“There were several times when the newborn whale was nearly completely out of the water,” the Scientific Reports paper notes. All the members of Unit A participated in the effort to prevent the baby from drowning, but a few—including the calf’s mother and her half sister, Aurora—took leading roles. More surprisingly, the core group also included a member of the second family, Fruit Salad’s granddaughter, Ariel.

“For a long time, there has been this underlying hypothesis that the reason that sperm-whale females live as a family is the need to communally defend and raise a calf,” Shane Gero, who is Project CETI’s lead field biologist and one of the authors of both papers, told me. “But there’s never really been good evidence, scientifically speaking, of something that would count as coöperation, where there’s a cost involved between non-kin that are living together. I think this shows that, during birth events, non-kin coöperate in a way that is both costly and that requires some kind of logging of social behavior, like, You helped me last time, I’ll help you this time.”

Another finding that surprised (and touched) the researchers was that Rounder’s fifteen-year-old half brother, Allan, showed up for the birth. Allan has been separating from Unit A for several years, but, like many a human teen-ager, he seems unsure about whether he’s really ready to live on his own. Allan remained at the periphery of the group during most of the post-delivery activity, but he did eventually get close enough to touch the newborn.

“To me this shows that there’s a lasting bond between these animals—a social memory across time,” Gero said.

Earlier, members of Project CETI found that they could predict when sperm whales were likely to dive based on the sequence of codas they had exchanged. Before, during, and after the birth, the researchers were recording the interactions of Unit A via hydrophones—basically, underwater microphones. They found that the whales’ “vocal style” changed during the birth and also when a group of potentially threatening pilot whales showed up. What the sperm whales were “talking” about, however, remains to be decoded.

“It’s an incredibly complex data set that is filled with all these nuances,” Gruber said. “But that’s kind of good. Because right now we’re still working on the baby slope, but this kind of shows us what the double black diamond is.” ♦

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The K-pop group BTS—by many metrics, the most popular band of all time—had a meteoric ascent before its members were called away by South Korea’s mandatory military service. Now, nearly four years later, the group has returned with a new record, “Arirang.” On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz delve into the album as well as the live-streamed concert and documentary that have accompanied its release, both on Netflix. “Arirang” is being framed as a return to the group’s Korean roots, albeit one that signifies a new, more mature era for its members, who are now in their late twenties and early thirties. The hosts consider BTS’s meticulously crafted image and its relationship to its devoted followers, known as ARMY. Intense fandom is nothing new—just ask the Beatles—but K-pop stans are particularly invested in the lives (and livelihoods) of their favorite idols, even paying for the chance to message them directly. “This further privatization of what we call parasociality,” Cunningham says, “if that can be monetized and organized, it really is the final frontier of the pop star.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

BTS’s “Arirang”
“BTS: The Return” (2026)
“KPop Demon Hunters” (2025)
Justin Bieber’s “Swag”
“The K-Pop King,” by Alex Barasch (The New Yorker)
The music video for BTS’s “Swim”
“Judy Blume: A Life,” by Mark Oppenheimer
The Beatles’ “Let It Be”

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

“They gave me a list of names to choose. ‘Sir, you could pick the name you’d like, sir.’ I said, ‘The name of what?’ ‘The name of the attack on Iran, sir.’ And they gave me, like, twenty names. And I'm, like, falling asleep. I didn't like any of them. Then I see ‘Epic Fury.’ I said, ‘I like that name! I like that name!’ ” —Donald Trump.

The twenty runners-up:

Operation Homeric Fury

Operation Classic Fury

Operation Instant Classic Fury

Operation Tumescent Fury

Operation Long-Fingered Fury

Operation Much Fury

Operation People Are Saying It’s Fury

Operation Bomb-a-Lago

Operation Golf-Course Grave

Operation Trump: The War

Operation Gulf War III

Operation Venezuela 2: Atomic Boogaloo

Operation This Time It’s the One That Ends in “N,” Not “Q”

Operation You’re Welcome, Bibi

Operation Billions Up in Smoke

Operation DTF w/ Tehran

Operation and You Thought the East Wing Took a Hit

Operation You’re Welcome, Vlad

Operation Jeffrey Who?

Operation Because I Can ♦

On the evening of July 4, 2025, around a dozen people arrived at the ICE Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, nearly thirty miles south of Fort Worth, for an event that they would later characterize as a noise demonstration. They wore black and brought with them Roman candles, first-aid kits, bubbles, a bullhorn, and a flag that read “Resist Fascism, Fight Oligarchy.” A few of them also brought body armor and firearms. From a distance of at least fifty yards, the group launched fireworks in the air, and relayed messages of encouragement in Spanish through the bullhorn. A young man, whom no one in the group had met before, brought spray paint. Someone wrote “fuck you pigs” on a guard shack; someone else slashed the tires of an ICE van. Two unarmed guards emerged from the facility and told the protesters to leave. The next few seconds were chaotic and confusing. An officer of the Alvarado Police Department drove up, got out of his car, and drew his weapon. One of the protesters, a then thirty-two-year-old named Benjamin Song, shouted, “Get to the rifles,” then fired his AR-15-style weapon. The officer, who was struck near his collarbone, returned fire. Song’s gun jammed—it may have been hit by one of the officer’s bullets—and he ran. Most of the protesters were arrested soon afterward; Song was apprehended eleven days later.

Initially, Song and others who were at Prairieland that night were charged with attempted murder. Then, on September 10th, the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed at an outdoor event at a college in Utah. President Donald Trump blamed the assassination on “the radical left” and vowed a crackdown. For years, Republicans had used the term “Antifa” as a catchall for left-wing activists; in the days after Kirk’s death, Trump issued an executive order, declaring Antifa a domestic terror organization, and a Presidential memorandum, directing federal resources to investigate and disrupt financial networks that fund left-wing domestic terrorism. During a roundtable on Antifa, which featured a mixture of conservative influencers and government officials, then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Antifa “just as dangerous” as Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS. In November, prosecutors released a new indictment that referred to the Prairieland defendants as “operatives” in a “North Texas Antifa Cell” and added the charge of material support to terrorists.

The Prairieland case was billed as the federal government’s first indictment of a purported Antifa cell. Earlier this month, nine defendants were found guilty of various charges, eight of them for providing material support for terrorism. (Song was also convicted of attempted murder.) “Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump Administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said of the convictions.

The three-week federal trial of the nine Prairieland defendants took place in a Fort Worth courtroom that had the ambience of a mid-century steakhouse: warm wood-panelled walls, dim lighting, murals of Texas Rangers on the wall. The defendants’ family members jockeyed for spots in the cramped space. One morning, Amber Lowrey, the sister of a defendant named Savanna Batten, showed up early after dropping her kids off at school. Lowrey told me that her younger sister had been acutely aware of the suffering of others, human and nonhuman, from a young age: “When she was twelve, she became vegan, and she never wavered. It was just immediate.” As a teen-ager, Batten was the president of Animal Connection of Texas, an animal-rights nonprofit, and lobbied for restrictions on travelling circuses. After her arrest in July, she was kept in solitary confinement for months. “She’s very well read, and she had trouble stringing words together after that,” Lowrey said. Like many of the defendants’ family members, Lowrey found it hard to believe that her sister would have attended a protest that she knew would turn violent. “She has never hit anyone, she won’t even say a swear word,” she said.

Benjamin Song’s mother was a regular presence at the trial. She wore elegant pants suits and professed absolute confidence in her son’s innocence. At least publicly, the defendants’ loved ones seemed loath to blame Song, and instead floated various theories for what had happened that night. Maybe the police officer had shot first, and Song had fired in self-defense, or to protect another protester. Maybe he had aimed at the ground, but misfired. Only one parent quietly condemned the shooting to me. “I think it’s despicable,” they said. “It made what everyone else did terrorism.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, law-enforcement officers searched the defendants’ cars, apartments, and a brick home, affectionately nicknamed the Big Gay House, where some of them lived. They seized more guns, body armor, and a printing press. They took pictures of a hoodie that said “chinga la migra,” stickers that read “be gay do crime,” and a drawing of President Trump with a swastika. They looked into the Emma Goldman Book Club, an anarchist reading group that several of the defendants belonged to. They collected publications with titles such as “Organizing for Attack! Insurrectionary Anarchy,” “Visualize Industrial Collapse,” and a zine titled “The Satanic Death Cult Is Real,” which offers a feminist analysis of horror movies. Law enforcement pulled over Daniel Sanchez Estrada—Rueda’s husband, who was not at Prairieland that night—on the suspicion that he had removed a box of explosives from her home. The box turned out to be full of more zines and an old love letter. Sanchez Estrada was charged with conspiracy and hiding evidence; he, too, was found guilty.

Although none of the publications were illegal—nor were the guns, the defense attorneys noted—the government argued that the evidence pointed to a shared ideology. In Assistant U.S. Attorney Shawn Smith’s closing statement, he said that the defendants should and could have known that Song would shoot a police officer, “because of Antifa.” Unlike other groups designated as terrorist threats, Antifa is more of a set of tactics and a political philosophy than a discernible group. Broadly speaking, it refers to a form of militant antifascism that embraces direct action—confrontations with right-wing protesters, say, or infrastructure sabotage. But the Trump Administration has embraced a more capacious definition. In the Presidential memorandum, Trump characterized the “common threads” of antifascism as “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Some coöperating witnesses, who pleaded guilty in exchange for lighter sentences, were asked by prosecutors to identify defendants who were aligned with Antifa. But when questioned by defense attorneys, they described their and their friends’ political beliefs using a range of labels: libertarian, socialist, communist, anarchist, and anti-authoritarian. The government attempted to reconcile the hodgepodge of leftist ideologies and micro-factions through the testimony of Kyle Shideler, a director and senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy, a far-right think tank. Shideler, who has put himself forward as an expert in radical Islam and “Black identity extremism,” is also focussed on Antifa. Shortly after Kirk’s assassination, he published a “roadmap for the Trump administration” detailing how to “dismantle far-left extremist networks”: targeting progressive nonprofits that may provide funding for leftist organizations and revoking visas for people who “demonstrate support” for anarchist or Marxist groups. According to the roadmap, environmental or abortion-rights groups are also potentially suspect, since they may be used “as a recruiting tool to activate individuals . . . and bring them further into a movement whose true objective is revolution.” Shideler is a regular guest on right-wing podcasts and cable-television programs, but this was his first time testifying as an expert in court. In his testimony, he purported to pinpoint various “hallmarks” of Antifa in the defendants’ behavior, including using Signal, wearing black bloc, and crowdfunding.

Later, I spoke with Tom Brzozowski, a former counsel for domestic terrorism at the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, who told me that the vague language around Antifa, both in this case and in federal filings, was troubling. “There’s no way to discern whether you know the activity that you’re engaged in might somehow be construed by the government as Antifa or Antifa-aligned,” he said. “The dude dressed in black mixing it up with an ICE officer physically—that’s a problem. You can’t assault ICE officers. But then you got the guy who’s at the same protest and was not assaulting anybody. Say they both went to the same training session that was put on two days before, about how to peacefully protest at ICE facilities and how to know your constitutional rights. And that training was funded by a philanthropic organization that’s interested in promoting civil liberties. That entire stream is now under active investigation—that’s ‘Antifa-aligned’ for you.”

During the trial, a group called the DFW Support Committee recruited volunteer note-takers to transcribe the proceedings. The volunteers included a divinity student on spring break and a woman with a long gray braid who told me that some of the defendants had helped out at her community garden. Outside, a small group of supporters congregated in a park across from the courthouse, where they passed out zines and vegan empanadas. Someone had made a puppet version of U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee, who presided over the case. The puppet wore a black judicial robe and had glistening eyes with slit pupils. “I don’t believe in the whole reptilian conspiracy, but someone did make his eyes look pretty scary,” one of them said.

The crowd in the park dwindled as the trial went on. The arrests, prosecutions, and coöperating agreements have had a devastating effect on an already small and embattled North Texas activist community. A support-committee member in glasses and a hoodie named Luis said that he’d taken the day off work to stand with the defendants, some of whom were his friends. In the days after the July 4th incident, law-enforcement officials had characterized the shooting as a planned ambush “designed” to draw ICE personnel outside—an elaborately coördinated plot rather than the reactive and volatile eruption that it seems to have been. “There’s a lot of fantasies circulating in our society, and one of the fantasies is exactly this—people making a violent confrontation with ICE in an organized way,” he said. “We who were close to the situation were, like, ‘We know these people, this is off.’ I don’t know what happened, but it’s not what they’re describing.”

Luis sighed when I mentioned the guns. Some of the defendants had been members of the Socialist Rifle Association, a leftist gun group, and held gun-range outings. Song, a former marine reservist, hosted tactical training sessions. The prosecution emphasized the fact that Song’s rifle had a binary trigger, which allowed it to fire twice as quickly, a modification that is typically legal in Texas. Lawyers for the government also brought up the fact that, in response to a text requesting a political donation, a defendant had replied, “As a leftist in Texas, my advice is to buy a gun and learn how to use it. Things are looking grim.”

“I’m not a gun person,” Luis said, “but Texas is a gun-culture place. People have guns as a hobby, as a social thing. And there is a history in this town of open carry of long rifles.” In the twenty-tens, Tarrant County, which comprises Fort Worth, was the hub of the right-wing open-carry movement: groups of pro-gun protesters would parade around suburban coffee shops and big-box stores with their rifles displayed. (Open carry of a long gun was already legal in Texas at the time; in 2016, the legislature legalized open carry of handguns as well.) More recently, armed counter-protesters were a visible presence at drag performances and Black Lives Matter demonstrations; soon, armed left-wing counter-counter-protesters started showing up, too. In 2020, an armed Black Lives Matter advocate named Garrett Foster was fatally shot by an Uber driver, who claimed that Foster was going to aim his gun at him. (The driver was found guilty of murder, but was pardoned by Governor Greg Abbott.) Some of the Prairieland defendants reportedly eschewed guns. “I’m a gun owner, and she’s never approved of that,” Lowrey told me, of her sister Savanna Batten. “She had a pair of maracas! They’re using her first-aid kit that she carries with her everywhere as evidence proving material support for terrorism. I’m, like, ‘What?’ ”

In the courtroom, Shideler’s long-winded testimony seemed at times to frustrate even Judge Pittman. “Just answer the question,” Pittman told him, after a particularly testy exchange. “You don’t need to spar so much.” After Shideler was cross-examined, the feeling in the park outside was briefly gleeful. “Oh, my God, it was amazing,” Gabrielle Koza, the mother-in-law of a defendant named Autumn Hill, said. “His whole testimony was a tautology!” Some supporters were hopeful that the Trump Administration’s indiscriminate use of the word “terrorist”—for instance, when describing Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Marimar Martinez—might cause even a jury of Texans to question the government’s case. But the prevailing mood on most days was low-key dread.

Some of the defendants, including Hill, are trans women, and Smith, the prosecutor, was either careless or strategic in his repeated use of masculine pronouns and names. (The trans defendants are being held in a men’s prison.) One afternoon, I watched as Lydia Koza, Hill’s wife, who is also a trans woman, listened to a prosecutor read posts from the Emma Goldman Book Club’s X account as she folded and unfolded a cough-drop wrapper with her long, nervous fingers. Gabrielle Koza, who had flown in from Arizona for the trial, put a thin arm around her daughter. When Pittman announced a fifteen-minute break, they both stood. “What’s the crime?” Lydia said to no one in particular. “What’s the crime?”

The prosecution delivered its closing arguments in front of a stack of firearms and boxes of radical literature. “What’s at issue here is using legal things to do illegal things,” Smith said. The defense characterized the case in starker terms. “They want you to put protesters in prison as terrorists,” Blake Burns, the attorney for a defendant named Elizabeth Soto, told the jury. “That’s not something that’s happened before, and you are literally the only people on earth that can stop that from happening.” The jury took about two days to declare the defendants guilty of many of the charges against them. (Five were charged with attempted murder, but only Song was convicted.) Song faces a sentence of between twenty years to life in prison. Seven others, including Hill, Batten, Rueda, and Soto, face between ten and sixty years. Sanchez Estrada faces up to forty years. Pittman will oversee their sentencing in June. Some of the defendants also face state charges.

After the verdicts were read, the defendants were driven back to jail. Their friends, family members, and supporters watched them go. Lydia Koza was wearing her blue-patterned wedding dress. “We love you, we see you, we would like to free you!” the crowd chanted. ♦

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The reporter Cora Engelbrecht joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss what life is like for the people of Iran as the war in the country unfolds. They talk about Engelbrecht’s reporting, which is based on dispatches from a dissident in Tehran who maintained contact during an internet blackout, and about how his account reveals some of the challenges of daily life under bombardment from the U.S. and Israel—and under a government that continues to police dissent. They also explore how the conflict has complicated the hopes of many Iranians who once saw foreign intervention as a path to liberation, and the growing fear that, whatever the outcome of the war, everyday citizens will continue to bear the cost.

This week’s reading:

“What the War Has Done to Iranians,” by Cora Engelbrecht

“A Former Prisoner of the Iranian Regime Watches Trump’s War,” by Jason Rezaian

“How Donald Trump May Have Sabotaged His Chances for a Deal with Iran,” by Isaac Chotiner

“The Distant Promise of Iran’s Would-Be King,” by Azadeh Moaveni

“Is Cuba Next?,” by Jon Lee Anderson

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.